A Dark and Bloody GroundKentucky never more deserved its Indian appellation A Dark and Bloody Ground than when a small-town physician, seventy-seven-year-old Roscoe Acker, called in an emergency on a sweltering evening in August 1985. Acker's own life hung in the balance, but it was already too late for his college-age daughter Tammy, savagely stabbed eleven times and pinned by a kitchen knife to her bedroom floor in Fleming-Neon. Three men had somehow managed to breach Dr. Acker's alarm and security systems and make off with a substantial amount of the cash that he had stashed away in a safe over his lifetime. The killers - part of a three-man, two-woman gang of the sort not seen since the Barkers - stopped counting the moldy bills when they reached $1.9 million. They found that all that cash came in handy shortly afterwards when they were caught and decided to lure Kentucky's most flamboyant lawyer, the celebrated Lester Burns, into representing them. And caught they were, because they refused to lay low, as advised by the gang's most crafty and unlikely member, Sherry Sheets Pelfrey Wong Hodge. Sherry, a former prison guard, had hooked up with chronic criminal Benny Hodge and begun a relationship based on love, credit card scams, and ingenious robberies that kept them comfortably in the middle class. Focusing on Sherry and Benny's bizarre relationship and ten-year crime spree, which had its roots in the Appalachia that bred them and the new South where they blazed their trail, Darcy O'Brien delivers a work of fascinating psychopathology. |
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Dark and Bloody Ground: Outlaw Love, A Miser's Hoard - Lust, Greed, and ... Darcy O'Brien No preview available - 2013 |
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